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Simple Gifts on the Hospital Floor

I think it’s safe to say that no one wants to spend the holiday season in the hospital. Whether you find this time of year inspiring, oppressive or a bit of both, the hospital tends to feel a little more alien than usual.

It’s a hard thing about the job of nursing. For many people December brings a slower pace to work. People and families come together. We open presents, eat too much and stay up late. Fireplaces get used, friends give gifts of cookies and neighbors take the time to chat despite the cold outside. In the hospital, though, it’s business as usual.

But that doesn’t mean it’s without its gifts.

My very busy day began at 7 a.m. Among my patients was a woman in her 30s with severe mouth sores, a difficult side effect of chemotherapy and immune suppression. The pain can be so great that patients need more or less continuous narcotics. The special pump we use for self-administration of pain medicine is called a PCA, for patient-controlled analgesia. Because it contains a narcotic stored in a large cartridge, the nurse can open it or adjust its settings only by using a special key.

On my floor, PCA keys seem to disappear with the frustrating regularity of matching socks in the clothes dryer. That day, late in the afternoon, I realized the key that usually hung by a slim rubber band from my wrist was no longer there, and I had no idea when it had gone missing.

I looked all over the patient’s room and checked through, under and around the cart that holds my medications. I tried hard to think when I had last seen the key, but the afternoon had been a flurry of activity and it was the last thing on my mind.

The lost key was the only one available for the entire floor. I needed to find it.

I told the charge nurse I had lost the key. She thought it likely I had accidentally thrown it away while taking off the gloves and gown we wear for patients on isolation precautions. It made sense. We take off our gowns by pulling them down and off, with the gloves attached. I saw how the key could easily get caught up in the gloves and end up in the trash.

The problem was, I had no time right then to sift through the garbage looking for the key. I needed to get caught up with other patients before going to look for it. My patient with the mouth sores could, for now, still medicate herself. But my other patients needed things only I could do: give pills, hook up IVs, draw blood for labs.

I was feeling very frustrated at not being able to be two places at once when the charge nurse, along with another nurse, put on gloves and gowns and started the very unpleasant job of going through wastebaskets in search of the missing key.

They started with the wastebasket on my med cart, then moved into the room of the patient with the PCA. Still with no success, they quietly started in on the trash for the patient on isolation.

Then, as I was coming down the hall, they emerged from the isolation room. The charge nurse smiled at me and held up, hanging from a thin beige rubber band, the small, shiny key.

I squealed and hugged her. She looked at me archly, but also happily. “I hope we’re at least going to get a coffee out of this,” she joked.

I promised her they would. For me and my fellow hospital workers, “coffee” has a meaning that goes beyond the standard cafeteria java. It means the mocha drinks and lattes, even hot chocolates with frothy whipped cream, from the coffee shop across the street. It can be a taste of happiness, an artificial slowdown in an otherwise nonstop day.

So when the three of us were back at work the next day and another nurse volunteered to go across the street to get coffee, I handed over my card and insisted on treating my colleagues to whatever they wanted.

One of my favorite Christmas images comes from the 1966 cartoon version of Dr. Seuss’s “How the Grinch Stole Christmas.” Near the end of the story, the Grinch has collected a sled full of toys, decorations and canned hash that he’s stolen from all the Whos. As he is about to dump them atop the highest mountain in Whoville, he hears the singing of the townspeople in the valley below, awakening him to the idea that Christmas is about more than just presents and tinsel. As the sled slowly slips over the edge of the peak, the Grinch finds the strength to rescue the sleigh and hold it proudly over his head, and we hear, “The Grinch’s small heart grew three sizes that day.”

Sometimes I wonder if I have enough heart to do this job. My shifts are challenging enough. Losing the key made it feel that much harder.

But having my colleagues sift through the trash — I never imagined that could feel like such a gift, that the generosity of two nurses could make my own heart feel so much bigger on a difficult day. And they did it unasked, without saying much and, despite the coffee quip, not expecting anything in return.

It’s the holiday season. For all of us in health care, the work and the giving continue.

It’s simple things like this that make a difference to everyone. Whether it’s helping to find a key or offering to hold a door, it helps both people. But I don’t think we should wait until Christmas to be nice to each other.

This is a heartwarming story. I know as a mother of a nurse, little things can add or subtract from a day. However, this story gives a perfect example of essential kindness. There is a story entitled, The Good Nearby. The characters within the story are being knocked around by life, but one was given the sage advice of her grandmother: Be the Good Nearby. That is, if you cannot do anything else in a situation, give your best – being the good nearby. Small gifts of kindness inspire in the most surprising ways often resulting in the realization humanity is bound by caring and concern.

I’ve been lucky enough to work (in mental health) with colleagues who were always ready to help out in a pinch, and I know how good that feels. I suspect the writer is the kind of person who gives her whole heart to her work and helps her co-workers when they need it. Thanks for sharing this story with us, Theresa. And love to your Mom! Jan

For me, Christmas is 365 days a year and so is hell – No rest for the wicked and I am wicked as can be :) Every day where I treat someone right is Christmas Day to me. To a large extent, we make our own heaven through our conduct and behavior. By the same token, we create our hell through our own conduct and behavior.

This is a beautiful story and wonderful example of the impact of an act of kindness. I love that it’s focused on hard working nurses. In my experience, nurses focus their entire being on care giving to others and when someone returns that to them it’s almost unexpected, and therefore huge. It’s a coincidence that today is the day I’m taking my medical office staff out to lunch and giving them my holiday gifts. Your story is a nice reminder for me to always make the time to care for my care givers.

Nurses like you and your colleagues ROCK! My husband had serious surgery 7 years ago . . . his nurses and aides pulled him through a very difficult time. He is alive and well because of them. I bought them a pizza party for Christmas that year and they were almost as grateful as I was!

I remember being assigned to write a story that had to involve a key, in 7th or so grade….(how do teachers come up with their assignments…?)
Being stumped, I wrote a story about a girl walking home from school who finds a key on the sidewalk, and spends the rest of her walk home trying to figure out what it might be a key to….unable to decide, she decides it is “a key to her imagination…”…

but now you have finished the story for me, some 30 years later…it was a key to her heart…the beautiful, simple humanity of people helping each other, when there could have been blame and recrimination….

I read your story cringing, knowing that I would have great difficulty facing certain of my nursing colleagues, had I been in a similar situation…some, indeed, you can depend, would have torn through the trash in a heartbeat, and would have retrieved the key with little blame towards me…others, I fear, would have written me up and gossiped mercilessly, trying to use my vulnerability to buttress against their own insecurities….it indeed, takes steadfastness to not give in to one’s very human, personal, and frail insecurities…but there is essentially no defense when someone is determined to wreck or blame you (look at the way the Republicans treat our poor President…yes, he works for rich interests over the common man, which makes it all the more damning that the Republicans tear him down so viciously)…

Having been cornered numerous times in such a manner is common to nurses, and people…in all professions there is fear of the back-stabbers, despite the best of one’s intentions…and there is no realistic defense…some people are particularly astute at disarming critics by being a friend to all, but given how individual our cultures, preferences, and beliefs are, that is a virtually superhuman aspiration, not really achievable…it saddens me when I see nurses attacked by other nurses, and I sometimes feel powerless to intervene, lest I jeopardize myself…a very cowardly position….

So I think that is why this story is so poignant, because, indeed, what if the key had not been found? What if dear Teresa was “written up”? And it landed on her record, so that “the next time,” there would be less leniency? This is the fear that nurses work under….the fear that despite our aspiring to call to our best demons, to always try to find the highest good, we are more often petty than we wish to be, we are mere humans who hate to look bad, we are all the things people blame us for and then some, because, guess what, we are repulsed and repugnant and any laundry list of negatives you want, just like you, but we try our very best to shelve all that while we care for you. We try our hardest, and sometimes we succeed, and sometimes we don’t, but we try, and try again…

Here in the UK the medical profession in general tend to get a very bad press, but I have often seen the very opposite. I was with a great friend in a hospital ward for terminally ill patients and the caring and compassion given by the staff was quite remarkable. I remarked to one young nurse that it was a privilage to have seen their work and she quietly replied “for me it is a bigger privilage to work with these patients.” An angel in disguise.